Jennifer Zarro is back to fill us in on “Taino: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean,” now on view at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. This celebration of indigenous cultural continuity in the modern Caribbean runs through October of 2019, and will include a September 8th symposium on the Taíno movement cosponsored by the Smithsonian Latino Center.

Andrea Kirsh visits the moving retrospective of multi-disciplinary artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, one of three exhibits on the artist currently on view in New York. Kirsh also takes a look at the catalog for this timely exhibition, which does important research that should open the door for more. The show runs through September 30th at the Whitney Museum.

Michael is bowled over by the depth and range of works in the juried Annual show. He finds beautiful pieces, pieces with emotional uplift and works that reverberate with our current social climate of alienation, distrust and violence.

Our collaborative team says the 41 large-scale abstract collage prints, made between 1984 – 1999, based on four (dense, somewhat obscure) books caused them to seek meaning subjectively, which sparked thoughts of what it means to be a major (or minor) artist; whether Stella is major or minor; and whether art should have clearer reference markers to be understood.

Michael is moved by the exhibit of works at the AAMP. The works touch on social injustice issues — the aftermath of slavery, police shootings of Black victims, Afro-Futurist utopias created to escape and take revenge. The imagery is stirring if also grisly in some cases, he says.

In her U.S.solo museum debut, Armenian-Egyptian artist Anna Boghiguian treats the politics of today amidst historical lessons from the U.S. past to create the heated emotional environment of protests singed with issues of slavery, bigotry, militarism and more. Katerina says it’s a show you will, if not enjoy, then appreciate for its passion and art making.

New Artblog contributor, Mark Lord visits “Agnes Martin: The Untroubled Mind/Works from the Daniel W. Dietrich II Collection” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and meditates on the enduring appeal of Martin’s subtle hand. Lord hopes this small exhibition of minimalist paintings from the 1960s and 70s, on view through October 14, will spark a resurgence of interest in the reclusive artist’s body of work.

Andrea Kirsh takes a trip to Chicago and shares her experience of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent Howardena Pindell retrospective. Across an impressive range of media and techniques, Pindell’s work tackles race, labor and the technologies that bind. This long-overdue exhibition, which was on view at the MCA from February 24 through May 20, will travel to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art later this year before showing at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum in early 2019.

Andrea Kirsh visits the PMA’s new exhibition, “Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950,” which celebrates art from our museum’s own early 20th century American collection, independent of its European counterparts. As the museum prepares for the 2020 unveiling of its renovated and expanded exhibition spaces, this show whets our appetite for what’s to come.

Mandy Palasik visits Spanish-born architect and industrial designer Patricia Urquiola’s first solo exhibition stateside, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through March 18th. “Patricia Urquiola: Between Craft and Industry” celebrates Urquiola’s innovative use of familiar forms and traditional techniques to activate both mind and body.

Imani Roach ponders “Went Looking for Beauty: Refashioning Self,” an exhibition of photographs by Deborah Willis currently at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. On view through April 29th 2018, this partial retrospective shows thematic highlights from Willis’s decades-long journey documenting the richness of black aesthetic and cultural practices, and demonstrates her continuing evolution as an artist.

Sometimes a show can be too big. Andrea talks about the new, 277+-work exhibition combining outsider and mainstream art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and says it includes many gems that are wonderful to see, but that the show breaks no new ground and winds up overwhelming even the hard-bitten art lover. She provides a few tips on what’s not to be missed.

New Artblog contributor, Mandy Palasik, takes us on a guided tour of Casa Gilardi, one of (revered Mexican architect) Luis Barragán’s final completed projects. For its caretakers and current inhabitants, this richly-colored modernist jewel, located in the heart of Mexico City, is both an active home and an artifact frozen in time.